Posted by Gordon Ansell on
20 July 2018 at 15:40
with tags: tech, science, society.
227 words, less than 1 minute read time.
External link to an article by Dave Lee on the BBC.

I applaud the companies creating these things. It’s the way we should be going. Granted the flying car in the article linked to above only has a top speed of 6MPH and a battery life of just 20 minutes, but it’s a start.

Our transportation systems seem to be getting worse instead of better — slower instead of faster — and that seems at odds with a so-called “advancing technological society”.

We have no commercial supersonic flight since Concorde’s demise, the roads are congested and speed-limited to the nth degree and the railways often just don’t run at all, either because of things like timetable changes or an endless series of strikes.

So props to any company trying to improve our transportation system.

The problem, though, will be the regulation. I’m convinced that driving, if it was invented now, would simply not be allowed and I dread to think about the reams of regulation that’ll be necessary to allow us to take to the air on a personal level. It would take governments — ably assisted by hoards of money-grabbing lawyers — decades to come up with the rules, and they would be aplenty. And that’s if it was even allowed at all.

Please excuse my pessimism here. It’s not the scientists, technologists and engineers I doubt, it’s the government and the law-makers.